Thursday, September 26, 2013

In one of the only bits of Margaret Wente’s column
on Michael Ignatieff’s new book that doesn’t seem like a rehash of articles in the Toronto
Star, the National
Postand the Sun
(there are 200 pages to choose from - why use the same quotes?), Wente describes Ignatieff's decision to enter politics like this: “He wanted to stop being a spectator
and be a player instead. He longed to join the ranks of intellectuals like Vaclav Havel
and Samantha Power, his Harvard pal who became Barack Obama’s ambassador to the
UN…”.

The bit about
Power is curious. Ignatieff, (born 1947),
was approached by Liberals to enter electoral politics in 2004. By 2005, he'd made up his mind.

Samantha Power,
born 1970, has never stood for elected office and was, like Ignatieff, a fellow
writer/academic when Ignatieff decided to enter the fray and run for a seat and the Liberal leadership.

While she later worked behind the scenes on Obama’s 2008
election campaign and served as a foreign policy advisor, Power was appointed
UN ambassador in 2013, well after Ignatieff’s 2011 defeat and resignation. How then, was Samantha Power an
inspiration or model for Ignatieff’s decision to “stop being a spectator and be a
player” ?

In fact, some
peoplehave argued that it
went the other way: “Power was influenced by the
Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff”. Given the age difference and timeline, this
makes more sense.

Compared to the
plagiarismproblems
last year, the fake Occupy
protester and other similar issues, this head scratcher is no big
deal, but it does speak to the value of Wente’s observations. Rather than curious tossed off claims like these, it would
have been nice to see that she’d read Ignatieff’s book and was able to pull out
and discuss passages that hadn’t already been covered elsewhere - especially in
a column dealing with hubris and over-rated public intellectuals.

Update: This also now appears at the end of the column:

Editor's note: This corrects an earlier version
which said Bob Rae threw his support behind Stéphane Dion in the final
leadership ballot in 2006.

Further Update on that
puzzling Editor’s Note (perhaps an example of a grudging correction whose aim
is not to set the record straight, but rather to limit the damage of the
initial error).

Wente
originally said Rae threw his support behind Dion to prevent Ignatieff from
winning the 2006 leadership. Now the
“corrected” version reads, “During the
2006 Liberal leadership convention he
refused to release his delegates to his old friend, with the result that
Stéphane Dion, not Mr. Ignatieff, won the race.”

Reports about
the 2006 convention however, indicate clearly that Rae “released his
delegates”. This means, obviously, that
he released his delegates to vote as they saw fit on the final ballot. Had Rae “refused to release his delegates” as
The Globe now claims, Rae would have been obliged to ask them to support a
particular candidate (unless he said, “I release you to vote for anyone but Ignatieff,” something
which is pretty well unheard of, and which, from what I can determine, he did
not do).

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Here’s how Margaret Wente begins an
articleabout Amanda Lindhout, whose book about being kidnapped and gang-raped
in Somalia for 460 days was recently released:

At 24,
Amanda Lindhout decided to quit her job as a cocktail waitress in Calgary and
become a foreign correspondent. She had no journalism experience, no contacts
and no background in history or geopolitics – she was a high-school graduate –
but she didn’t let that hold her back. She bought plane tickets to Kabul and
Baghdad, but almost nobody was interested in her work. She decided that to make
her name, she needed a breakthrough – something really big, like the hurricane
in Galveston that had made Dan Rather famous.

Here’s how other
reports like the New York Times, describe her background: Born in 1981,

“Lindhout
began her… travels at age 20, heading first to Venezuela. She financed her
peripatetic lifestyle by saving the tips she made as a high-end cocktail
waitress, taking off for months at a time, roving on a shoestring budget
through Central and South America, Asia, and Africa”.

USA Today
writes that Lindhout was a“seasoned backpack traveler”
who “visited
dozens of countries in seven years, from Burma to South America to Ethiopia…
returning to her home in Canada to wait tables only when she ran out of money”.“After six months in Kabul and another seven
in Baghdad, Lindhout, at age 27 in 2008”, ventured to Mogadishu.

“She backpacked
through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, then to Sudan, Syria, and
Pakistan… she continued to push the envelope, moving more and more off the
beaten path…Although she had no formal schooling in journalism, Lindhout began
writing columns for her hometown paper, and did freelance work in Afghanistan
and Iraq. After almost seven months in Baghdad working as a television
journalist for Press TV”, Lindhout set out for Somalia.

So
Ms. Lindhout travelled for many years, then
began to write about her experiences, taking the initiative to try and sell stories
and photos, occasionally returning to wait tables to help finance her
journalism ambitions. But Ms. Wente
isn’t prepared to give her credit for that, or indeed even for her own memoir,
which as every review notes, was “co-written”
by Lindhout (first author) and New York Times Magazine’s Sarah Corbett. “It
was actually written by Sara Corbett,” Wente says.

Nor
is there any mention by Wente of what The New York Times and others describe as
Lindhout’s “unfathomable grace and
wisdom”, or her
substantial charitable work on behalf of Somali women and children since her
release. (What is this article, really?
Not a book review, not a discussion of larger issues, just sniping at
Lindhout’s character, her looks, and what seems like jealousy of the attention
she’s received).

While Wente’s lack of
generosity is remarkable in its specificity, it’s pretty much in keeping with
the way she usually describes young people (particularly young women) - as lazy,
stupid, naïve narcissists. While she
slips in a swipe at Lindhout’s high school diploma, those who have the nerve to
think they’re university material usually come in for even more disdain.

I’m not suggesting
Lindhout’s decisions didn’t have some bearing on her capture, or that her rescue
may not have been dangerous or costly. But Wente hasn’t similarly attacked the
thrill-seeking skiers and snowmobilers who go out of bounds, cause avalanches
and provoke expensive searches in the Rockies every winter.

Apparently,
unlike Ms. Wente, Lindhout comes from a hard scrabble background, and job prospects
for young people these days are bleak. For
example, there’s a tragic
story today about the effects of unpaid internships on a young man
desperate to work in journalism.

So
given Ms. Wente’s criticism of Lindhout, it’s worth remembering both her
significant plagiarismproblems
last year,
and what she did in one of those other easy, repeated columns about stupid, naive
young people. Wente’s fake
Occupy protester is pretty ironic.
An eager young, would-be journalist – willing to travel - might have
gone down the street to try and snag an interview.

It’s
just possible that, unlike some of her betters, Amanda Lindhout was at least
trying to work for a living. For that,
and for what she’s done since, she deserves a fairer hearing, and a better
journalistic role model.